Within the sports marketplace, and especially at the more elite levels, the ability to review pertinent video sequences from games or training sessions is of high value. Current practices for creating such video breakdowns rely upon a combination of real-time and post-event operator input. Companies such as XOSTech, of Sanford, Fla., provide real-time video capture, edit and display software that has at least a keyboard interface for indicating when important events occur, start and/or end. These events might be the next specific play in football where it is beneficial to know at least when the play began and ended in a time sequence that corresponds to the game video. Such begin-end event time indications may then be used to automatically recall corresponding relevant video. Events may also be instantaneous such as the time of a fumble in football or shot attempt in basketball or ice hockey.
There are several drawbacks with these manually controlled video breakdown systems at least including:                1. Manual operated breakdown of video is tedious and therefore also prone to human error;        2. Operators have limited reflex speed and therefore are limited in their ability to accurately record a real-time event such as the exact end of a period of play with the correct frame in a video stream, which may be of importance when trying to determine if a team scoring attempt was completed within regulation time, and        3. Operators have limited observation skills and typically best respond to only a few real-time events at any given moment, which may be important when they are trying to indicate each time a shot-on-goal has been recorded while they are also trying to record hits, plays, passes, etc.        
Hence, what is desirable is a system that automatically determines the exact start and end time of any event that is of importance for later video breakdown and video clip extraction. Some events have minimal duration, such as a shot-on-goal, in which case it is simply important to record when the shot was taken, without a start and end time per se. In any case there are many important events that cannot be determined by automatically reading the venue scoreboard and for this reason the present inventor has already specified inventions for automatically tracking the movement of athletes in a sporting contest and creating an event list correlated to the event video (see Related Applications above.) However, most if not all of the information displayed on the scoreboard may be helpful for at least partially breaking down any and all synchronized game video, especially in youth sporting events where no other viable option exists. Hence, just the ability to breakdown the entire game video into periods is helpful. Furthermore, the ability to jump into periods of video at specific “time-in” and “time-out” sports is also important.
Therefore it is the object of the present invention to provide apparatus and methods for automatically determining the ongoing and real-time character-by-character changes on an electronic display, especially on a game scoreboard being used during a live sporting event. It is still further an object of the present invention not to require any wired or wireless input from the scoreboard or its controlling console but rather to rely solely upon the same scoreboard radiated visible energy used by fans to receive visually presented data. A further object is to provide this ongoing changing character output synchronized to a system counter that itself implies real-time and is itself synchronized to one or more video streams. It is also an object to provide this streaming data in such a way that it can be mixed and compared to other real-time data gathering systems such as a player and game object tracking system so that together their output data may be used to imply important information that may not be otherwise determinable.
Still further objects and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from a consideration of the drawings and ensuing description.